Iran claims victorious capture of a flying lawnmower

The drone Iran claims to have "hunted down" is cheap, small, and low tech.

A ScanEagle launched from a US Navy "aircraft carrier"—a MK V special warfare patrol boat off the coast of San Clemente Island, in February of 2008.

US Navy

The Iranian military claims it captured a US Navy drone in the Persian Gulf. In an interview with Iran's state-run Press TV, Iranian Revolutionary Guards naval commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi said his forces "hunted down" the drone after it was detected entering Iranian airspace and then forced it down electronically. Iranian state media further claimed the ScanEagle had been launched on a spy mission from an American aircraft carrier.

But it's more likely the Iranians came across the Boeing Insitu ScanEagle drone they displayed by some other means. And whether the drone was ever launched from a US ship is open to question, as the ScanEagle is flown by the military of many countries. It's been used by ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as by the Navy. The small, relatively inexpensive ScanEagle, based on a design originally used by commercial tuna fishermen searching for the catch of the day, may itself have been hauled up in a fishing net some time ago.

Iranian state television's report on the "capture" of a ScanEagle drone.

Commander Jason Salata, a spokesperson for the US Navy's 5th Fleet, said all its drones are accounted for and none have been lost recently. (Salata did admit some “have been lost into the water" in the past.) And the loss of a ScanEagle wouldn't exactly be an international incident. Four feet long with a 10-foot wingspan, the ScanEagle has a top speed of 80 miles an hour and is powered by a German engine originally designed for lawnmowers. This is no Predator. But it can stay in the air for as long as 30 hours at a time to provide a persistent electronic eye in the sky.

It’s that long endurance that has made ScanEagle a workhorse for the US military since 2004, when the Marine Corps contracted Boeing to operate the ScanEagle for forces in Iraq (as a way to get past the usual roadblocks of purchasing a system). It was used by the Navy during the standoff with Somali pirates in 2009, and it has also been flown heavily by the Australian and Canadian militaries, among others.

This year, Boeing's Insitu subsidiary added the militaries of Malaysia and the Netherlands to its customer list. And there are commercial customers as well. A company in the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi Autonomous Systems Investments Company (ADASI), has partnered with Insitu to support commercial and military customers of the ScanEagle (and its successor, the Integrator) in the Middle East.

The Australian Army's 131 Battery, 20th Surveillance and Target Acquisition Regiment launches and retrieves a ScanEagle drone at multi-national base Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan in November of 2012.

Originally equipped for simple daytime surveillance with an off-the-shelf Sony video camera reconfigured in a rotating gimbal, there have been additional variants of the drone introduced during its eight years and more than 500,000 flight hours of service. An infrared sensor was introduced for night operations in 2009, and customized electronics payloads for over-the-horizon communications have also been added. In 2010, the Navy looked at turning the ScanEagle into a guided "munition"—a kamikaze drone loaded with explosives.

It doesn't take an aircraft carrier to launch a ScanEagle. The drone's pneumatic catapult system can be mounted on a trailer and on vessels as small as a patrol boat. It is retrieved by use of a "skyhook" system that snags the aircraft when it flies past a mast equipped with a GPS system. SkyHook in its original manifestation was a Genie Lift mechanism that you could buy from the local Home Depot. As Insitu director of business development Erik Edsall told FlightGlobal in 2009, "We hung a nylon rope from the boom off the top, put a GPS antenna on the air vehicle on the top of the boom and then patented the algorithm that we used for the GPS that allows guidance to a particular point on the wing where the nylon rope engages the wing within a couple of centimeters."

It's possible the Iranians somehow spoofed the GPS signal of a landing mast in order to get a ScanEagle to fly to them for capture. But it's more likely they obtained one that had crashed all on its own. Small drones like the ScanEagle crash frequently—over 90 Shadow drones alone have crashed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2007.

They're pretty dumb self-guiding model aircraft. They're vaguely self-righting and self-altitude-keeping, but not very good at that. You can put together a CyanogenMod-wielding phone (I used a very cheap ZTE Blade, as it will run without a screen attached) to do a much better job with nothing more than the JTAG interface and some cheap 74-series logic gates, buffered by transistors to a model plane's servos.

They crash. A lot. One variant us Brits like to test keeps getting washed up on the North Sea coast. But they're cheap as shit and use nothing that's anywhere near classified. Even the GPS is civilian precision and probably uses a phone-intended SoC with accelerometer, orientation sensor and GPS.

One would think the US would build all drones with a remote detonation capability to destroy itself in case it is lost or captured.

Why? In most cases it probably doesn't matter. Given all the problems due to unexploded ordinance around the world, I'm guessing the US government isn't partial to contributing to that potential problem without a good reason.

This reminds me of the time I lost a frisbee. It turned up in the garden next door. My neighbour was annoyed but he didn't use it to try and score points on the international stage. Nor did he attempt to photoshop it into something more epic.

This reminds me of the time I lost a frisbee. It turned up in the garden next door. My neighbour was annoyed but he didn't use it to try and score points on the international stage. Nor did he attempt to photoshop it into something more epic.

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

You're mixing up middle-eastern countries. The population of Iran is relatively well educated and affluent. Also most of them don't hate westerners. They just have a really nasty government right now, which is partially our fault.

Iran has been screwed over by the west for god knows how many times in its history. Up to this day, the West still practice their outdated rhetoric and diplomacy. What would happen if today China started sending drones to the west coast? Would Americans just sit quietly by?

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

You're mixing up middle-eastern countries. The population of Iran is relatively well educated and affluent. Also most of them don't hate westerners. They just have a really nasty government right now, which is partially our fault.

Actually, the rampant inflation (was it 3000% in the past decade?) is having severe repercussions for many of Iran's citizens.

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

You're mixing up middle-eastern countries. The population of Iran is relatively well educated and affluent. Also most of them don't hate westerners. They just have a really nasty government right now, which is partially our fault.

I think it's sad that you were voted down for just stating the truth. Seems there are people here who have no idea what the people of Iran are like and the history of US involvement with their government.

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

You're mixing up middle-eastern countries. The population of Iran is relatively well educated and affluent. Also most of them don't hate westerners. They just have a really nasty government right now, which is partially our fault.

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

Just for laughs people should look up what the Iranian Navy is like and compare it to the US's 5th Fleet. It makes his comment even more hilarious.

"After an Iranian mine ripped through a U.S. warship, Reagan had enough and ordered a series of punishing military responses against Iranian naval assets all across the lower half of the Persian Gulf. While most Americans forget this war on the Gulf, Tehran doesn’t. On a single day in 1988, the U.S. crippled Iran’s navy: U.S. helicopters disabled and then captured an Iranian ship; U.S. warships set Iranian oil platforms ablaze; and the U.S. armada eliminated six Iranian warships, effectively turning Iran’s military into a land-only force. Even the New York Times called it “The right response to Khomeini.” "

I had a lawnmower once that sounded like that. My new one is much quieter and runs much smoother. Maybe we just gave it away to the Iranians like I gave away my old lawn mower. The guy who got my lawnmower thought it was the best thing he had ever gotten.

I wonder if you could arm these small cheap drones. Put a mortar or something of similar size and drop it where you please. The drone gives extra range to the munition covering a wide area. If the drones are cheap enough and small enough it won't be easy or cost effective to shoot them down, kind of a rope-a-dope situation where you blast away with with expensive missiles until you run out of ammo (or money) and then get swarmed.

There might be downsides if the command and control system is simplistic and easy to disrupt but the level of sophistication of the tools that could be built into a modern SoC could make it fairly hard to spoof commands.

There is never a new technology which can't be made better by sticking guns on it 8-)

I wonder if you could arm these small cheap drones. Put a mortar or something of similar size and drop it where you please. The drone gives extra range to the munition covering a wide area. If the drones are cheap enough and small enough it won't be easy or cost effective to shoot them down, kind of a rope-a-dope situation where you blast away with with expensive missiles until you run out of ammo (or money) and then get swarmed.

There might be downsides if the command and control system is simplistic and easy to disrupt but the level of sophistication of the tools that could be built into a modern SoC could make it fairly hard to spoof commands.

There is never a new technology which can't be made better by sticking guns on it 8-)

The point being that any large organization or nation state can probably afford to build a lot of these kinds of things, it puts them on more equal footing with an aggressor who brings a lot of fancy glass cannons. Air power with drones might look a lot more like the mass air attacks of WWII.

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

You're mixing up middle-eastern countries. The population of Iran is relatively well educated and affluent. Also most of them don't hate westerners. They just have a really nasty government right now, which is partially our fault.

Considering I grew up there, I am not confusing anything.

In my original post, "They" refers to the regime being crushed by sanctions. They ARE having trouble keeping food affordable.

The US government does a lot of crappy things to other countries no doubt but the hostage crisis and overthrow of the Iranian government happened over 30 years ago.

When does it not become even partially the US's fault any longer? Sorry but I get a little tired of blaming the US for somehow being the root cause of most of the worlds problems.

The point is that they wouldn't have had to overthrow the US-backed government if the US hadn't previously destroyed their democratic government a few years prior. The hostage crisis wouldn't have happend and a lot of other things wouldn't have happened as well.

As far as wondering if 30yrs is long enough, major geopolitical changes can take many decades or centuries to work them selves through so yes, you probably can continue to assign blame. It's not as if the US has been hands-off this entire time either, how many Iranians have died due to US interference in those decades? Compare to the number of Americans who have died due to Iran.

LOL. The thumbnail from the first video shows a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini saying: "We will crush USA under our feet." Talk about delusions of grandeur ....They're lucky if they can feed themselves and the populace and they're gloating over a lawmower engine powered drone as a great victory?

You're mixing up middle-eastern countries. The population of Iran is relatively well educated and affluent. Also most of them don't hate westerners. They just have a really nasty government right now, which is partially our fault.

Actually, the rampant inflation (was it 3000% in the past decade?) is having severe repercussions for many of Iran's citizens.

AND, its ENTIRELY the US and Great Britains fault they are what they are right now. If not for British and American oil interests Iran would still be a democracy.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.